Tracking blogroll referrals

>> http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/2002/12/13.html#a641

Here's an idea.� When you put someone on your blogroll why not add something like "?blogroll=true" to the URL.� This way click-throughs via the blogroll (rather than an article) will stand out.

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CGI parameters are one way to track blogroll referrals; it's a rather harmless method of doing so. There might be a one in a thousand who don't want to indicate that they found you through a blogroll link, but they're already going to be fighting a battle with HTTP referrer headers, and this doesn't add much. There's a couple other method, though, that may serve the purpose better.

If you look at a few of my comment postings around the blog community, I've been using unique email addresses for each blog; I used to do it per-comment, but Doc Searls' list of visitors' blogs started listing me multiple times, so I stopped that. The hyperlink URL to my blog generally is tagged with a ?from=radio-0107808 or somesuch parameter; I don't currently have referrer logging turned on, and I'm curious to know who visits in the meantime.

My web server seem to completely ignore "unknown" (see: "from") CGI parameters, so I don't expect you'd run into any problems there.

There's a way to do this, though, that would allow you to indicate the source being a blogroll using HTTP referrer headers. If MovableType's blogroll list was available via mt-blogroll.cgi, say, then you could route click-throughs on the front page through that CGI; it puts out a redirect page, and the linked-to page gets a Referrer header showing that it came from a certain blog's mt-blogroll.cgi.

I'm just using MT as an example there; it could be done as a simple redirector with a visible name that includes "blogroll". Apache mod_rewrite, CGIs, mod_perl handlers, whatever. I invoke the lazyweb here, with a willingness to code such if someone asks me directly :)